Slashdot Mirror
Through a Face Scanner Darkly
An anonymous reader writes in with a story that raises the issue of how public anonymity is quickly disappearing thanks to facial recognition technology. "NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company's database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone's name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there's a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry."
Perhaps we should start posting fake profiles with random data to make the thing unusable?
because no one would misuse this tech to act creepy.
True story:
Back around 1989 I was maintaining a minicomputer system for a small chain of Auto Body Shops near Ft. Worth Texas. I got to know a lot about how the business works and made friends with some of the VERY blue collar guys who sanded, welded, painted and whatnot.
At that time the body shop had dedicated terminal that could dial up the Texas DMV database and retrieve the registration info for a given license plate. On at least two separate occasions I observed one of the shop guys using the terminal to get the name and address of a car they observed that was driven by an attractive woman. Nothing creepy or potentially dangerous there? Yeah.
Maybe we should study CCTV operators in England to make sure that attractive women, or any other category of people, aren't being watched more closely than everyone else.
I work with a registered sex-offender. The reason why this guy works for us is because he was grandfathered in before the company started doing background checks, and we don't see a reason to let him go since he is in compliance with the law and does his job really well.
You can look him up and see his face and everything, again, he's fully compliant. Most importantly, though, we don't hold his past against him because his offense was something like "Intent of Sexual Assault," which is something that any cheating or otherwise regretful whore could have fabricated after leading a man on while in a drunken stupor before her boyfriend found out and gave her an ultimatum.
Of course, the whole registry thing is simply to convince suburban housewives that evil is always lurking around the corner, and that they should be perpetually afraid of events with little statistical significance. But we're not talking about terrorism, this time.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Yeah, I could really use this as a prosthetic.
I can't remember faces, and I have a lot of trouble recognizing them. It's not full-blown prosopagnosia, but it's a real problem in daily life -- for example, if I run into a familiar co-worker at a grocery store, I'm likely not to recognize them, and I might come across as cold or distant. I compensated by being friendly to everyone, which earned me a reputation for being nice, if a bit spacy. And I can recognize my family, even "picture" them in my mind -- but I couldn't tell you what shape my wife's nose or ears are. Sketching people is right out.
I'd love to have heads-up subtitles on people, not to be creepy, just to put me on even footing with the rest of the world. If the price is that I have to feed knowledge of who I'm seeing to the Overmind, though, I'm not sure I'd strike the bargain.
Prediction: "smart" masks that not only obscure your face but also photorealistically display the face of some other random person.